From Ben Okri 's essays

Following a few aphorisms on story-telling & storytellers:

The infinite interpretability of great stories – and their serenity.

To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. 

The greatest guide is the clearest spirit and mind. 

That’s what the true storyteller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness. Dante chose Virgil. I would choose Jesus, or the Buddha, or Lao Tsu, or Homer.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. 

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. 

The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination.

The greater the will, the greater the secret failure

The true storyteller suffers the chaos and the madness, the nightmare – resolves it all, sees clearly, and guides you surely through the fragmentation and the shifting world.

Here, a few fragments on beauty:

The moon is more than what we see. Its appeal is cosmic and beyond the mind’s full conscious comprehension. It is as deep in us as it is far above us. To see it is to resonate with a thousand invisible forces and feelings. 

Such is beauty. To the religious it hints at the spiritual realm and draws the mind to a contemplation of the infinite. To the non-religious, it inspires fascination, pleasure, and desire. In both there is desire. In the spiritual, beauty inclines to desire for the highest, for the absolute. In literature it inclines towards anunquenchable hunger for the finest artistic impulses, for creativity, love. In the scientist, beauty inclines towards the great desire to understand, to explain, to make clear the laws of the universe, the mystery of all things -- time, space, matter, light creation.

Beauty leads us all, finally to the greatest questions of all, to the most significant quest of our lives. 

 ...Beauty in how time resolves evil.

On Poetry:

Poetry is closer to us than politics, and is as intrinsic to us as walking or eating. We are, at birth, born into a condition of poetry and breathing. Birth is a poetic condition: it is spirit becoming flesh. Death is also a poetic condition: it is flesh becoming spirit again. It is the miracle of a circle completed, the unheard melody of a life returning to unmeasured silence. Between birth and death what are our daily moments but a double condition that is primarily poetic: the odd conjunction between inner and outer, between that inner sense of timelessness and that outer evidence of transience?

Poetry begins in us an inner dialogue. It suggests a private journey to one’s own truth.

Let us bring together the voices of poetry from all over the world, and make our hearts a festival, a dreaming place, and our minds an academy of essentials under the stars.

Poetry is not just what poets write. Poetry is also the great river of soul-murmurings that runs within humanity. Poets merely bring this underground river to the surface for a moment, here and there, in cascades of sound and suggested meaning, through significant form.

The reason for the exalted condition of poetry is simple. Poetry is a descendant of the original word which mystics believe gave the impulse for all creation. Poetry, at its highest, has alive in it, even in homeopathic doses, the creative power of the universe. Poetry incarnates that which shapes, changes, transforms. It makes something from what seems like nothing. How insubstantial words are! Who can weigh a word on a scale, even against a feather of truth?

And yet see how much words weigh in the heart, in the imagination, in dreams, echoing down the ages, as durable as the Pyramids. Words, lighter than air, are as mysteriously enduring as lived time. Poetry hints at the godlike in us, and causes us to resonate with high places of being.

A few others  (all from couple of his poetic essay books - A Way to be Free and Time for New Dreams)

The universe will always be greater than us. Our mind therefore should be like Keats’ thoroughfare, through which all thoughts can wander. It should also be a great cunning net that can catch the fishes of possibility.

An ideal creative genius would be one who knew how to consciously initiate great play, as well as how to harness great discipline, towards the most sublime endeavours.

A child is born into an inheritance of all books, all thoughts, all the music and art and science that have been created in the perpetual pilgrimage of humanity along the dusty roads of time.

On difficult times:

The Aeneid reminds us that great civilisations can be built on great failures. It also reminds us that adversity is not the end of a story but, where there is courage and vision, the beginning of a new one, a greater one than before.

Difficult times do one of two things to us: they either break us or they force us to go back to the primal ground of our being.

Adversity wakes us up. It reminds us not of who we think we are in our vanity, but who we really are in our simplicity.

There are few blessings more solid than being made to take the measure of ourselves.

The highest point of a great civilisation is not necessarily its golden age: that is merely the fructification. The highest point is actually in its earlier stages, after a people have worked their way out of a long adversity, having disciplined themselves, and faced their truths, and conceived worthwhile and magnificent goals, and moved steadily towards them with faith and a rapture of overcoming. Alexander after the conquest of Darius; England in the Elizabethan age: this is where a people most becomes itself.

On composition 

There is no need to panic. The intelligence that shaped the universe shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the process of composition.

There is no genuine creative or human problem that cannot be solved if you are serene enough, humble enough, hardworking enough, and if you have learnt the gentle arts of concentration, visualisation, and meditation. For me, tranquillity is the sign of the invisible presence of grace.

And like all artists they should create beauty as best as they can, should serve truth, and remember humility,

Beyond Words:

Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.

About hospitality, 

about how it means 'we have faith first even before we have evidence'. And how 'the ideal of hospitalitydoes not die even when it has been betrayed, but is only made wiser.' 

And then Plato's Dream which can perhaps be copied here in its entirety but will leave myself a cue to read it up again in the book itself :)

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